This article proposes a model for linguistic analysis of scientific thought-styles, combining quantitative and qualitative analyses in the variationist frame and focusing on writings of the scholastic period. The first part of the article considers factors that led to the vernacularisation of scientific writings in fifteenth-century England and the sources, underlying traditions and audiences of these writings. The empirical part focuses on two features typical of scholasticism: references to authorities and the use of prescriptive phrases. The results show statistical (...) differences between varieties of writing. A close semantic analysis reveals a pattern which is related to the underlying layers of tradition and to the sociohistorical background of the texts. The material comes from a computer-readable Corpus of Early English Medical Writing 1375-1750, which the authors are compiling at the University of Helsinki. (shrink)

We provide a taxonomy of the two most important debates in the philosophy of the cognitive and neural sciences. The first debate is over methodological individualism: is the object of the cognitive and neural sciences the brain, the whole animal, or the animal--environment system? The second is over explanatory style: should explanation in cognitive and neural science be reductionist-mechanistic, inter-level mechanistic, or dynamical? After setting out the debates, we discuss the ways in which they are interconnected. Finally, we make some (...) recommendations that we hope will help philosophers interested in the cognitive and neural sciences to avoid dead ends. (shrink)

The turn to modern science in the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century is typically characterized as dependent on the novel adoption of a mechanical hypothesis for operations in nature. In fact, the Middle Ages saw a partial anticipation of this phenomenon in the scholastic physics of the thirteenth century. More precisely, it was just the two factors, denial of action at a distance and an emphasis on the primary materiality of causation, that constituted this early mechanism—or "protomechanism." The latter's (...) emergence can be seen most clearly where scholastic thinkers—here, William of Auvergne, Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome—confronted the theoretical limits of natural cause and effect in their efforts to determine the reality of magic and locate its place in the natural world. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy of mind is much concerned with issues pertaining to ‘mental architecture’ — describing how mental processes are organized, typically by identifying sub-personal functional mechanisms which causally interact, often through the intermediary of a mental representation, thereby giving rise to psychological phenomena. Such internal mental mechanisms can be quite low-level and operate with a degree of relative independence; if so, they may be considered ‘modules’ or minimal centres of mental activity. A module or a set of modules may be (...) speciﬁc to a given domain of phenomena, e. g. only processing visual data. The way in which a set of mental modules is arrayed makes up the architecture of the mind, oﬀering structure to ‘inner space’. The detailed structural articulation of the mind offers psychological theories some traction on the slippery realm of the mental. (shrink)

In 1597 Francisco Suárez published a comprehensive treatise on beings of reason (entia rationis) as part of his Disputationes metaphysicae. Subsequent scholastic philosophers vigorously debated various aspects of Suárez’s theory. The aim of this paper is to identify some of the most controversial points of these debates, as they developed in the first half of the seventeenth century. In particular, I focus on the intension and the extension of ‘ens rationis’, its division (into negations, privations and relations of reason) and (...) its causes. Additionally, I will discuss how Suárez’s views sparked a number of debates within the classical view, debates which ultimately led to the emergence of various alternative theories, especially among the Jesuits. These non-classical views radically revise the previous classical conception of beings of reason. (shrink)